In certain states, sales tax is added. Check www.applemusic.com for details, no doubt.
Apple pays a service charge, but its unclear how they have managed to implement such a micropayment system. I would suspect that at the time of purchase they simply put in an authorization on the card, which sets aside a certain amount, for a certain period of time in the hopes that you’ll purchase more music before the payment has to be taken from the card, at which point they lump all your up-to-that-point authorizations into one actual charge, thus paying only one transaction fee for several purchases, instead of taking the hit out of each $0.99 sale.
Billing is not complex at all. When you buy songs, they get added to an invoice, which Apple sends you later. I don’t, however, know the time span for individual invoices. If you don’t have enough to cover it (this happened to me), they send a notice. As far as I can tell, they don’t check your credit line for sufficient funds until they send you the invoice.
This is a C+P of one of my invoices. As you can see, the songs (I bought these with the shopping card option off) are totaled up and the final amount of 13.87 is charged all at once, which my account statement reflects.
000 Q0002 ITUNES MUSIC STORE 3 0.99 2.97
Enya Anywhere Is
Enya Only If...
Enya The First of Autumn
000 Q0015 ITUNES MUSIC STORE 1 9.99 9.99
The Alan Parsons Project Tales of Mystery and Imag
________________________________________________________________________________
Subtotal 12.96
Tax 0.91
TOTAL USD 13.87
Tax is added if you live in a state with an Apple Store, which applies to me since there is a store in PA.
If the whole thing is handled electronically with no human intervention, the transaction cost for a $.99 purchase is no diff from a $99 purchase. As far as the credit card companies are concerned, they are paying for a tiny data storage and a maximum of one line of printed data on the bill, probably fractions of a cent in cost to them. A 5% service charge to itunes is probably mosty gravy.
A lot different from an old-style, in-store purchase where the merchant has to run your credit card thru a {kerchunk-kerchunk} machine, strip off the carbons and save the paper to take to the bank.
You can do whatever you want with the files. No restrictions. Burn them to as many CDs as you want.
You get CD quality music, not lossy compressed files. You can then take this music and encode it into 256kbs or even 320kbps MP3s so you’ll have better quality. You could even copy the raw audio data directly and keep full CD quality.
Imagine you want to make an MP3 of an iTune. The AAC file is already compressed, so you have to decompress it to put it on an audio CD. Now you have a giant WAV file with only the quality of a 128kbps AAC file. If you want to make it into an MP3, you’ll have to compress it again, losing even more quality. Yuck.
I would happily pay $1 for a losslessly compressed (e.g. *.APE or *.SHN) song, which is about 2/3 the filesize of the original WAV, but I doubt anyone will ever make a service like this available.
This is an old thread, so you may have discovered this by now, or they added it since you wrote it, but just in case: you can go to the iTunes Preferences window, select the “Store” tab, and choose to use a shopping cart instead of single purchases.
I finally got my PowerBook and I’ve been using the store this week. I think so far I’ve spent about $30, most of that to get a couple of CDs that I had traded in a while back and was feeling nostalgic for.
As far as I can tell, they do everything right, but the selection is still pretty limited. The first time I signed on I tried 10 different searches and came up with nothing on any of them. And none of them particularly obscure bands, either. So far, it seems mostly useful for browsing, or for getting that one song you wanted from an album but couldn’t justify buying the whole thing.
Which gets back to the OP. I don’t know if it’ll revitalize the music industry. (And after the RIAA’s announcement today, my opinion on that is “fuck the music industry”.) But it might bring back the single. Which I see as a good thing; it could stop “artists” from recording albums with crappy filler material and then charging people $18 just for one song.
The argument mentioned earlier, about how Metallica (by the way, fuck Metallica as well) and other bands weren’t signing up because they wanted fans to listen to the whole album instead of just getting individual songs – that’s BS. They (Metallica, at least) don’t seem to have any problem making videos, which are just advertising singles anyway. And Apple’s music store is set up so that the artist can require the whole album be downloaded instead of just single songs.
Der – I didn’t read the whole thread before “explaining” the concept of the shopping cart. I’m still getting used to this Mac OS browser… yeah, that’s it.
And note that you can’t record the music you buy to as many CD’s as you want, at least, not without changing the playlist you use to burn the CD. You’re limited to 3 CD’s with the same playlist, IIRC. And if you try to copy the MP4 file to a machine other than the one you downloaded it on, you have to “unlock” it with your iTunes store password. (A friend and I did an experiment with this.)